Post your Questions & Topics for Tomorrow’s AFTVnewscast

I’ll be live streaming this week’s episode of the AFTVnewscast tomorrow at 1:30pm PT, as I do every Friday. Post your questions or topics in the comments below for me to answer and discuss during the episode. Anything goes for questions, whether it’s about the Fire TV, the new Echo Dot, the new Amazon Tap, AFTVnews, or tech in general. Let’s hear them! Even if you can’t watch live, ask your question now and catch the episode on YouTube later.

34 comments

In 5.0.5 – Amazon decided to create a tab called “Your Videos”. But that section has several categories with titles like “Prime – best of Movies”, “Prime – Recommended Movies” … none of these are “My videos”. The only two categories (of around 20) pertains to “watchlist” and “your subscriptions. These two categories should the only ones under “My Videos”, since these are only ones I tagged. I would not want to see anything else under that tab.
So I sent a very pointed email to Amazon and to my amazement they responded and acknowledged that it was confusing and they are going to fix it in the next release. So I would encourage others, who feel the interface could use some smart and logical improvements, to send an email to Amazon support. Else, they will assume everyone is happy with the way things are.

I emailed them about the same issue and that all the apps, games and things I subscribe should be at home rather scrolling other places just to find it. TV shows, movies, apps/games have there own section only for purchase. The home section should the user own section nothing else.

I’ve noticed that sd card & usb devices are not writing properly since updating to 5.0.5 on kodi jarvis 16.0, is this a software thing or is it because kodi jarvis it’s accessing the writes functions properly? (Like backing up Kodi or writing files to the storage ) Is there a workaround/fix to this? Thanks in advance

Once the pre-rooted rom is released, no doubt Elias will re-write some of his guides to sort these issues out. The same as moving full apps to SD or USB, that’s also pending for tje pre-rooted 5.0.5 update (and quite urgent for me personally…)

How does OS 5 affect RAM. Is it using more free memory than OS 3? My 1st gen Fire TV generally shows roughly 1.2 gb of free memory in System Info. What is your overall impression of OS 5 on the 1st gen Fire TV.

The community (at least us newbs) need a solid overview of rooting the fire tv as far as where do we start and what should we do and in what order? I’ve tried the forums at xda and while there are clearly many experts there and lots of information, from my standpoint with no experience the forums there are a mess as they lack stickies or any kind of 1, 2, 3 approach to aid in learning.

What is root? What is a rom? What is recovery? What is customer recovery? et cetera and what order are they performed in? This would be invaluable to help newbs, as no one is offering this.

Kodi does not show up in the apps section on my first gen fire tv after updating to 5.0.5 like it does on my second gen. I read posts from others saying the same, but did not see any working solution. Is it possible to get it to show up?

Try deleting the app on your Amazon account. Then go to setting under account and sync. If still doesn’t show up try launching Kodi. Don’t exit kodi right try launching a program in kodi then exit. It should show up. Or sync and reboot.

Thanks for the best website I can find on the Amazon Fire TV. I want to buy the Fire TV 2 primarily for the streaming music/internet radio options as I like the ability of having a full screen to search for music rather than only relying on voice through the Echo.

But how is the music quality of the Fire TV when listening to TuneIn and IHeartradio etc? Obviously I don’t expect it to be as good as the Echo, especially since I will be sending it from the LCD tv utilizing a 3.5mm ouput wire from the TV, but I’m hoping the quality will be better than the Apple TV 4 which had a distorted sound.

I do like that the Fire TV does not have the geolocation ability that the Echo has as I would rather not have it broadcast my location information to Amazon, do you have any idea if the new Amazon Tap will have this geolocation ability?

And finally can you set the Fire TV to automatically delete all voice data that gets saved to the cloud or is the only option to delete each voice sample individually on the Alexa web app?

If you can in fact only answer one question on the podcast, the first question on sound quality is the most important. Thanks for your time.

Tomorrow I will get an amazon tablet (yohoo) somebody brings back from the US. Cannot buy here unfortunately.

Can I sideload from my amazon tablet with AKG fire to the fire TV?
Is AKG fire in the amazon app store or do I need to sideload it to my tablet?

The amazon dot is very cool. The tab however I don’t fully understand. Why would you want this speaker if you have to push a button every time? They should have made it always listening at least when it’s plugged into power. What are your thoughts?

First of all, thank you very much for an incredibly informative and useful website regarding Amazon products. Very nicely done!

Second, regarding the new Amazon Tap, do you think it is possible to allow the Tap to be in an “always listening” when it’s in the charging cradle? I highly doubt this would be possible…essentially turning the Tap into an Echo when it’s charging…but maybe with an IFTTT recipe or something like that it could be done?

I’m thinking of getting a USB 3.0 64GB pendrive for my FTV. But I have a spare old USB 2.0 external powered 3.5″ 1TB drive that I never use.

Would you think the pendrive or the HDD would be better? Due to age, I would imagine the drive is a 7200rpm IDE drive.

I’m thinking on the lines of moving full games/apps to USB once you manage to review your guide on that for FOS5.0.5.

On another note, due to Jellybean’s limitations on writing to SD/USB, do you think it’ll be possible to move full apps/games to USB or would it be better to take the Link2SD route that moves EVERYTHING to USB and uses USB as all memory instead of it’s own memory?

If that’s the case, what would you recommend in this scenario: pendrive or USB drive?

I’ve been trying to cast Youtube from Google Chrome on my macbook Pro to my Firetv. It always seems to fail. It works fine with my Nexus Player and Chromecast. It seems like I had this working before but I’m unable to cast from Chrome to Fire Tv. Any ideas on how to fix this? Thanks in advance.

I use SFTP to backup (and, if needed, restore) my data to a network drive. With Fire OS 3, restoring data to my unrooted FTV1 using an FTP client like FlieZilla was not an issue as I could write to any directory I wished. Now, of course, I am unable to write to any directory under Fire OS 5. Any ideas about how to get passed this issue? Thanks.